Publishing Will Break Your Heart Over and Over Again

And still, why I write.

Last week I received an unexpected piece of mail. Inside the simple yellow package was a copy of my latest novel All the Summers in Between, only it wasn’t from my publisher. It was from a group of book lovers.

Let me explain.

Last May, a bookstagram friend of mine organized her “Beyond the Pages” book club to read my novel over the course of the summer. Eleven members of the book club shared one copy of my book —a traveling arc, they called it. As each person read the book, they left little notes in the margins, then sent it to the next person. Some of them attached stickers beneath certain paragraphs or chapter endings. The book traveled from South Carolina to New York Maryland to Florida, North Carolina and California.

Sometimes the women in the book club remarked on a line they loved. Other times they reacted to something one of my characters did that made them howl. There were over a hundred little sticky tabs so I could open to each page and read their thoughts. “I love this,” wrote one reader after reading the line: “And while time could change the face, adding laugh lines or age spots, it rarely changed the soul.” There was a “No way!” and then a “Ha!” after two readers read the line, “I mean, thirty is good, right? No, it will be great. I definitely feel better than I did at twenty.”

At several points in the book, chunks of passages were highlighted in yellow to indicate how much it was liked.

I found myself crying as I stood at the kitchen counter flipping through the well-loved copy. At first, I wasn’t sure why I was reacting so strongly. I didn’t feel sad. I didn’t feel disappointed in anything I was reading. It was the opposite. The notes gave me a sense of what readers found relatable, insightful and profound.

I found myself smiling.

After dinner, I held it up for my husband to see, and my kids couldn’t believe that these women had taken the time to read the book so carefully. I realized then why I was wiping tears from the corners of my eyes.

It’s the simplest form of joy for a writer to go on a journey with a reader through your book. Even after all of my in-person events where I met oodles of readers, I never felt as satisfied as simply flipping through the pages of my book in step with these women I didn’t even know.

Authors today are under so much pressure to build a brand, and so we make inane videos on social media and pick up side gigs writing newsletters (ahem). We stand up in front of crowds and tell jokes and try being entertaining when we are rarely nourished by such behavior. We go out into the world and SELL, SELL, SELL a book while lobbying our publishers for more support. We smile, sign another book, smile some more. I didn’t realize how exhausting it all was. How utterly depleting and heartbreaking publishing can feel at times.

And I think that’s why I was crying at the counter. It was a release from all of that pressure. But really, it was because this marked up book in my hand was one of the purest connection to readers that I’d ever felt.

I write to make people feel and dream, to understand others a little deeper and to build empathy. I write because I see pain and joy, fear and love all around me and it’s so satisfying (and restorative) to capture those emotions in scenes on a page. I write for connection. And thanks to this book club, I could see exactly how my words can (and have) impacted people.

Those tears at the kitchen counter? They were happy ones.